Dudes

Wallace Shawn’s and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s survivors.

Jeremy Pope (center) and the singing prep-school students of “Choir Boy.”Credit Photograph by Brian Finke

Wallace Shawn’s primary impulse in his dramatic work is to fuck with the audience. Not through content—though he messes with that, too—but through form, which more or less dictates how an audience will respond to a play. Shawn’s style is marked by long, digressive monologues, little dialogue, and even less action. By jettisoning the standard conflict-and-resolution structure, he asks his audience to divest itself of certain comforts, including the centuries-old habit of listening for recognizable feelings, recognizable thoughts.

As his generation’s preëminent maker of postmodern drawing-room spectacles, the sixty-nine-year-old Shawn has no interest in nostalgia. His characters are the literary-minded children of liberal good guys and phonies, who have been sent to the best schools, where they developed an interest in civics and sentences. But Shawn’s word junkies rarely talk about their family backgrounds—he abhors sentimentality, which he depicts as the pathetic refuge of the weak or the venal. Nor does he bathe in his characters’ bathos. In his beautiful play “Our Late Night” (1975), an apparently successful urban couple throws a party in an apartment that befits their status. And yet a stage direction indicates that their living room should look as if it “might tip over” and the things in it “might fall—or slip.” Shawn wants us to see his creations at a Dutch angle. We don’t generally associate his characters with rooms—or rooms that matter, anyway. In his 1996 play, “The Designated Mourner” (in revival, at the Public, under the intuitive and graceful direction of Andre Gregory), what we notice first about the set is not its smallness or the large bed that dominates it but the cinereal light, and how the actors, who spend much of the play sitting as still as possible, look like statues in the rain.

A kind of metaphorical precipitation falls in “The Designated Mourner,” but it’s an acid rain brought on by the three characters’ ceaseless talk about talk, their bitterness, smugness, and wild humor. The person who speaks first is Jack (Shawn, in one of the great performances of his career). Sitting stage right, away from the bed, Jack wears a black sweater and black slacks. His white head seems to float above his small, compact body like a globe. The world is changing. Outside, the ruling class is imprisoning and executing the writers and intellectuals it considers subversive. Lighting a piece of tissue paper, Jack says to the audience:

The designated mourner. I am the designated mourner. I have to tell you that a very special little world has died, and I am the designated mourner. Oh, yes, you see, it’s an important custom in many groups and tribes. Someone is assigned to grieve, to wail, and light the public ritual fire. Someone is assigned when there’s no one else.

Jack is that no one else who becomes a someone. At first, he looks uneasy with what Marianne Moore called “the inconvenience of responsibility,” and yet he puffs his chest out with pleasure at the idea that he is the only speaker onstage, that he may have outlived the other people in this story. (The other characters may or may not be dead.) Jack has survived because his wife, Judy (Deborah Eisenberg), a critical-minded, sensitive writer, and her father, Howard (Larry Pine), a respected poet, never prepared themselves for the dissolution of their world. Like the privileged everywhere, Judy and Howard assumed that it would always be there, intact, because it was theirs.

But who takes the time to learn from history’s patterns—especially if, like Judy and her father, you believe that you are part of history, intellectual and otherwise? Jack can make no such claim. This interloper studied English literature, but he was never anything as fancy as a poet. He has grown strong by feeding on his own class resentment; wiliness is part of his DNA. A resident of the “real” world, he knows that shit will always float to the top. Early in the play, he says, “Christ, you know, I remember so clearly the moment . . . years ago—when someone was saying, ‘If God didn’t like assholes, He wouldn’t have made so many of them,’ and the person who was saying it looked right at me as she said it—ha ha ha.” Jack’s not hurt by this insult, or by any insult. He isn’t interested in much besides his acrimony and his various manipulations.

Cue Judy. Thin and chic in black trousers, Judy is self-possessed and regal—an academic princess. Her hair, black with white streaks, reminds one of Susan Sontag’s. Her lips are painted a royal red. She does not smile as she sits a few feet away from Jack. “I guess the search for more refined techniques of execution never ends,” she says, in the weary tone of a woman who always has the last word. But Jack won’t give her that, or much else. She can’t control him, and that experience is, for her, a form of ecstasy, or death. She says, “I loved him so much, it was a kind of torture.” And then, “The one thing he never would say—the word he couldn’t stand: love.” Jack’s refusal gets her motor racing; he represents all that Judy, a child of the humanities and of logic, can’t know or understand. He’s her disaster, and she cannot look away. Like Strindberg’s Miss Julie, Judy has an aristocratic father and a lover from the underclass, but in Jack’s solipsistic narrative she’s only a plot point—as is Howard, with his acumen, hauteur, and unimpeachable patriarchal might. Jack is mystified, and a bit cowed, by Howard’s ability to pick up a book by John Donne and just read it. Jack was not born “like” Judy or her father, and the only way that he can compete with Howard is by having dominion over Judy’s body, which she’ll give up to whoever can tell the most interesting story about it.

Shawn, in his devastating play “Aunt Dan and Lemon” (1985), wrote about female bodies in pain, and how attempts to master one’s corporeal self can become attempts to control the world. Like the young invalid Lemon, who is obsessed with Nazism, Judy is the (at times) passive audience that thrills to the “otherness” of power. Shawn doesn’t judge Judy for this; he just shows us the science of her personality. In a 1986 essay on “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” Shawn wrote:

Lemon’s thoughts have unlimited destructive power. I didn’t invent them—they’re everywhere. . . . Perhaps I could have defeated Lemon’s thoughts in the confines of the play, but this would have given the audience the impression that in my opinion those thoughts had been safely buried at least for the evening and everyone could go home and sleep in peace, whereas actually I don’t believe that . . . and so in fact to . . . give the play a satisfying ending would be, for me, a form of lying to the audience.

The lying that goes on in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “Choir Boy” (a Manhattan Theatre Club production, at City Center, directed by Trip Cullman) is part of the plot, but it’s also germane to the play itself. Set in a prep school attended by boys of color, the ninety-minute drama shows its hand in the first scene: Pharus (Jeremy Pope) is singing the school anthem at a graduation ceremony, while a fellow-student hisses the word “faggot” over and over from the audience. Pharus manages to get through the song, and then “swishes” offstage defiantly. He’s “fierce,” the spiritual son of Albin, in “La Cage aux Folles,” singing “I Am What I Am,” even when he isn’t. Blackout. The headmaster (Chuck Cooper) demands that Pharus identify the culprit, but Pharus won’t betray him. More soap opera, and the only thing that brings all the boys together is song: the prefab drama of gospel music.

McCraney, who is thirty-two, is still building his career, but it is being built, increasingly, on his weakest work, which capitalizes on his apparent difference (McCraney is black and gay) but doesn’t ask anything of his soul as an artist. He’s becoming regional theatre’s go-to guy for “other” theatre—and it may wreck him. Shawn, in his theatre work, has for the most part explored the lives of heterosexual outsiders, bitterly fighting to get into what they perceive to be the nexus of power. What if he were to create a gay character who, unlike McCraney’s hollowed-out, warbling youths, didn’t define himself according to the audience’s ideas about race and sexuality but was as uniquely upsetting and fascinating as anyone else? “I have wondered, in case anyone’s interested, What gives me the right to . . . write about such things?” Shawn noted in his essay on “Aunt Dan and Lemon.” “I’m not a victim, a survivor. I haven’t suffered. . . . My conclusion . . . was that anyone has the right to think or speak about them.” Of course. But not every speaker possesses the ability to shape the truth with a heretical heart and a righteous imagination, which is the reason some of us go to the theatre in the first place. ♦

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, has been a staff writer since 1994.